How to Live Together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy – Closing Symposium on 12 to 14 October 2026

Closing Symposium of Kone-funded research project “How to Live Together in Sound”

We all communicate through sound and contribute in different ways to constituting and sustaining more-than-human communities in the aural domain. We condition and shape our common life-worlds through the performance of our aural and sonic actions: hearing and listening, as well as producing, processing, and distributing sounds. We outline different forms of otherness and commonalities by mobilizing sonic agencies in encounters that unfold, at least partially, in the aural medium.

As artistic research practitioners we provide new evidence of all these complex and intertwined processes by expanding and enhancing our sonic attention and awareness. We thereby disclose new possibilities of understanding different shapes and ways of individual and collective aural being-in-the-world.

Anchored by the generic question “how to live together in sound?” and complemented with the expression of a social, societal, and political orientation “towards sonic democracy,” this symposium offers a framework for in-depth exchanges about practices and method developments, insights and concepts, experiences and expressions that co-constitute our common sonic and aural lives.

With several international guests and around twenty topic presentations and audio works, this symposium assembles a group of artistic researchers and scholars for in-depth conversations around the topics of the research project.

The project is funded by the Kone Foundation and hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki. The symposium is free of charge but requires a pre-registration.

More information

Jannika Lahin
jannika.lahin@uniarts.fi